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Future Direction
Where we bat about the ball of the future Ethan's e-mail of 3 July 2006 Dear friends, I wanted to invite you to join a conversation that a few of us have been having around the Global Voices project for the past several weeks. The conversation is about the future of the Global Voices project and it is in its very early stages - hence, it's a great time for you - the authors, editors and supporters of our community - to share your thoughts and help shape our collective future direction. When several dozen bloggers and activists got together in a conference room at Harvard Law School in December 2004, we discussed dozens of projects our community could take on to support bloggers around the world and make a global audience aware of the revolution taking place in citizen's media. We've pursued one one of these strategies - a global blog aggregator - with great success. But we've done a lot less on other fronts. I'm hoping the time is right for Global Voices to broaden its focus and start taking on a wider range of projects. There are several good reasons we've focused on building Global Voices Online. One is that it's an idea many people have been passionate about - some of those passionate people have become authors or regional editors. We were lucky to have Rebecca's passion and years of experience running a newsroom, which helped us get the project off the ground much more quickly than I thought possible. Hard work by our amazing regional editors and managing editor have quickly turned the site into one of the world's most influential blogs. And the financial support that Reuters has provided has let us compensate Rachel, the regional and language editors for their hard work. It's becoming clear that there are other projects we want - and need - to take on beyond the website. The detention of Hao Wu and Alaa reminds us all that blogging can be a very dangerous activity in some parts of the world. We have a responsibility to advocate for the release of our comrades who are detained for exercising their rights to free speech. Personally, I believe we have a community responsibility to advocate for the rights of all bloggers and people creating media. We've also discovered that groups around the world hope to learn from our successes and failures - many people involved with the GV project have been asked to speak, teach or lead workshops on blogging and citizen's media. Again, I think we have a responsibility and an opportunity to share our knowledge and support growing communities of bloggers around the world. With this in mind, I'm hoping that Global Voices can take on (at least) two new projects: one on advocacy, one on outreach. I'm in the very early stages of discussions with potential funders - I think both these ideas are ones we could generate support for, letting us bring on full or part time employees to coordinate these efforts. On the advocacy front: we're all inspired by the important work Curt Hopkins did with the Committee to Protect Bloggers. It's critical that a group of people compile information about bloggers and authors under threat or detention and advocate for their release. Mary Joyce and others are trying to take lessons from the Free Alaa campaign and building a "hub" to support future campaigns. I believe Global Voices could find fiscal support for a part-time coordinator who would maintain a content section on Global Voices Online about detained bloggers, coordinate advocacy efforts with organizations like Reporters without Borders and Committee to Protect Journalists, and communicate with the global media. On the outreach front: We are receiving dozens of requests for GV-affiliated bloggers to speak about experiences with citizens' media in their countries. We're also getting requests for GV-affiliated people to lead workshops on building local blogospheres, helping new users start blogs, or helping people in closed societies communicate online without revealing their identity. I believe there's an opportunity for Global Voices to act as a "virtual speaker's bureau", providing opportunities for bloggers who'd like to travel to conferences or lead workshops to do so. I also think we could begin developing a curiculum - possibly in cooperation with Dan Gillmor's Center for Citizen's Media - to help share the lessons we've learned and make it easier to give talks and lead workshops in the future. We have some limited funding from Reuters for these activities, but we don't currently have funding for someone to coordinate this work. I'd like to raise enough money that we could hire a coordinator and provide travel funding - we've already been able to fund some travel for GV regional editors to attend conferences based on money from Reuters. I'm open to the idea that there are more or different projects we should be taking on, or that the way I'm describing these projects is not the way we should go. I'm especially interested in feedback from people who've been involved with outreach and advocacy efforts, ours or otherwise. Because I'm starting the proposal process now, this is a great time for feedback and input. A related issue: in a future Global Voices where we've got Rachel leading the website effort and coordinators leading advocacy and outreach efforts, and perhaps other projects proposed by the community, the structure - or lack thereof - we currently have isn't going to work. More than a few of you have suggested that our unique combination of anarchy, consensus and dictatorship isn't working especially well now. I believe that a healthy, future Global Voices needs to be an independent organization, not part of the Berkman Center and Harvard Law School, as it is now. Berkman supports this path, and is helping us research the possibility of becoming an independent NGO - one open question is what country we would incorporate it. An independent NGO would require a board of directors, and an executive director. Neither Rebecca or I are candidates for that executive director position - both of us need to be less, not more, involved with Global Voices. Furthermore, we both believe this future management team needs representation from all over the world, especially from the developing nations we cover. As an intermediate step towards a board of directors, Rebecca and I would like to convene a board of advisors. We'd appreciate your thoughts on smart, prominent people in the media and technology world - especially from developing nations - who might be willing to advise us as we grow and transition. Thanks for all your support and involvement with Global Voices - I hope you'll join the conversation and help us shape the future of this project together. -Ethan Zuckerman ---- Advocacy - responses David Weinberger I wonder whether, in addition to being a speakers bureau that responds to requests for speakers, GV could create its own occasions for passing on what it's learned. Could GV get funded to do a series of workshops in locales around the world? ---- Heh. This is the model I proposed to Janet Haven, one of the smartest - and most blunt - funders I work with. She strongly advised we not pursue this direction, because it requires amazing logistical capacity. We have a relatively tough time planning the single conference we organize per year - organizing a series of occasions would require hiring one or more conference planners as I'm so disorganized, I can rarely be relied on to brew coffee in the morning. She suggested the speakers bureau model as a way for us to leverage the organizational capacity of others - if an NGO or group of journalists is arranging a conference in Mongolia, we could provide a speaker to the event, rather than arranging our own "Blogging for Nomads" conference. That said, a substantial grant could allow us to hire sufficient people to make doing our own series of conferences a reality. This is very much an issue we should discuss and debate before putting together a proposal - it's always possible to ask for a larger grant to start a conference series and step back from that idea if costs look prohibitive. Ethan ---- Mary Joyce I am really thrilled by these new steps that GV is taking. When I first met GV at the London conference I said that I hoped that GV could be used as a global network for activism/advocacy and I'm really happy to see the organization turning in that direction. I think it is interesting that Ethan sees advocacy and outreach as two separate projects, because I see a lot of over-lap here. The common ground is skill-sharing. Sharing how to create an advocacy campaign or sharing how to create a blogosphere, the basic purpose remains the same: empowering individuals to use digital citizens' media to express there concerns. I believe a digital activism Hub (sorry for the obvious plug of my pet project) could act both in an advocacy role - collecting reports from bloggers around the world, liaising with organizations like RSF - and an outreach role - connecting skill-sources (blogging experts) to skill-seekers (would-be bloggers) - either digitally or face-to-face. Of course, the Hub is only one possible way of achieving the goals of advocacy and outreach and since the Hub would move away from blogging as a focus (and towards digital activism in general) maybe it is not the best fit from the GV community. In any case, I am really excited that this conversation is beginning. ---- Mary's absolutely right - there is major overlap between outreach and advocacy. There are two main reasons why I put them forth as separate ideas. One is that I think there's a couple of funders who might support explicit advocacy projects but would be less interested in general outreach projects. Similarly, Reuters is able to support some outreach efforts but would be reluctant to get explicitly into the business of advocacy. The second reason is that I think we're likely to have some projects that are explicitly threatening to some governments, and others that are comparatively innocuous. I suspect we'll have an easier time running a workshop in Belarus if it's being run by our outreach and training team, rather than a team of self-declared cyber-activists... But I'm open to the idea that this is a false distinction. At the very least, Mary's comment is a reminder that all three (or two :-) branches of the organization will need to work closely together. The goal is not to create three separate teams, but to have three heads to one common body. Ethan ---- Amr From Amr, another Free Alaa co-organizer: Thanks Mary for copying me in this. I guess the next step is to have something online, and a few people working with it. GVO hosting seems to be coming eventually, but what about now? How many people do you think will come aboard right away? It is all a domain name, a Drupal installation, and people to add content and continue the discussion online, right? ---- Outreach - responses Eric Osiakwan My suggestion is GV should consider establishing a basic training programme in blogging which can be offered to newbies and that could be an outreach activity that would enlarge the community. Such training programmes can be done independently but can also be tagged along existing activities where possible. The ideas is to work towards making blogging as mainstream as e-mail and other uses of the web. ---- I think the goal is absolutely right, Eric. The question is going to be how we achieve it. Do we write a curiculum for new bloggers and translate it into different languages? Or compile existing resources and help translate and disseminate them? (Neha Viswanathan is already doing some work, compiling existing teaching materials to help us out on this front.) Do we run our own trainings, or produce curiculum that lets other people run trainings? I don't have good answers for these questions, which is one of several reasons I'd like someone to head up this project and make these decisions... Ethan ---- Jordan Seidel hi, in terms of outreach/education...i would second any motion to involve young people and children more. for example, some internships for young bloggers as asst local editors, etc...as for children, gv might focus on child related topics...a special section, gv for juniors...gv-photo gallery... for board of advisors, i think bill gates should get an invite...some might cringe, but interesting possibilities could come out of it... ---- This is a very cool idea, Jordan. I don't think we ever explicitly decided that GV was an adults-only zone. Momentum for this might rely on having contributors and regional editors reaching out to youth communities in their areas. Rachel, is this an idea we might want to pursue as a special feature for a week? Ethan ---- Eduardo Avila I am the director of a leadership development program for high school students in Washington DC. All of our students are exclusively African-American, Latino and African, which are populations that are not especially represented in the blogosphere. The students take classes with us during the summer and this year we implemented a class called Participatory Media, which incorporated blogging, wikis, and most importantly, critical reading and thinking skills. Since taking over the program, I had the idea to add this course to our curriculum and lucked out on finding a teacher who shared this vision and really ran with the idea. Our instructor came up with a fabulous curriculum, which has been a huge hit. I think, especially with younger students, it is not only important to teach them how to use these new technologies, such as blogging platforms and wikis, but also how to think critically about issues and how to back them up with facts, but also so that they know that their opinions contribute to the dialogue. As soon as our summer program is over, I am going to ask her to put the curriculum in document form and I definitely think that class has been a success and it will continue to evolve. I would love to take the curriculum to Bolivia and provide it to youth there, as the education system does not encourage questioning/critical thinking/independent thought. So stay tuned.. --eduardo a. (barrio flores) ---- Other issues raised in responses Another heading just in case